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Poetry
on Heavenly Mountain," by China's Emperor Gaozong]] on a gravestone in an English churchyard]] Poetry (from the Greek " ", , a "making") is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or lyrics. Poetry, and discussions of it, have a long history. Early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy.Heath, Malcolm (ed). Aristotle's Poetics. London, England: Penguin Books, (1997), ISBN 0140446362. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasised the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from prose.See, for example, Immanuel Kant (J.H. Bernhard, Trans). Critique of Judgment. Dover (2005). From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a fundamental creative act using language.Dylan Thomas. Quite Early One Morning. New York, New York: New Direction Books, reset edition (1968), ISBN 0811202089. Poetry often uses particular forms and conventions to expand the literal meaning of the words, or to evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poetry's use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, metaphor and simile create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm. Some forms of poetry are specific to particular cultures and genres, responding to the characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. While readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, and Rumi etc may think of it as being written in rhyming lines and regular meter, there are traditions, such as those of Du Fu and Beowulf, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony. In today's globalized world, poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse cultures and languages. Basic elements Prosody Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter, although closely related, should be distinguished.Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry at 52. Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Thus, the meter of a line may be described as being "iambic", but a full description of the rhythm would require noting where the language causes one to pause or accelerate and how the meter interacts with other elements of the language. Prosody also may be used more specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter. Rhythm :See also Parallelism, inflection, intonation, foot The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions. Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, or moras, depending on how rhythm is established, though a language can be influenced by multiple approaches.See, for example, Julia Schülter. Rhythmic Grammar, Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, (2005). Japanese is a mora-timed language. Syllable-timed languages include Latin, Catalan, French and Spanish. English, Russian and, generally, German are stress-timed languages. Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived. Languages also can rely on either pitch, such as in Vedic or ancient Greek, or tone. Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, and most subsaharan languages.See Yip. Tone. (2002), which includes a number of maps showing the distribution of tonal languages. Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm based on meter in Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (alone or elided). In the classical languages, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the meter. Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line.Howell D. Chickering. Beowulf: a Dual-language Edition. Garden City, New York: Anchor (1977), ISBN 0385062133. ]] The chief device of ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry, including many of the psalms, was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three. Parallelism lent itself to antiphonal or call-and-response performance, which could also be reinforced by intonation. Thus, Biblical poetry relies much less on metrical feet to create rhythm, but instead creates rhythm based on much larger sound units of lines, phrases and sentences. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar) which ensured a rhythm.See, for example, John Lazarus and W. H. Drew (Trans.). Thirukkural. Asian Educational Services (2001), ISBN 81-206-0400-8. (Original in Tamil with English translation). In Chinese poetry, tones as well as stresses create rhythm. Classical Chinese poetics identifies four tones: the level tone, rising tone, falling tone, and entering tone. Note that other classifications may have as many as eight tones for Chinese and six for Vietnamese. The formal patterns of meter used in Modern English verse to create rhythm no longer dominate contemporary English poetry. In the case of free verse, rhythm is often organized based on looser units of cadence than a regular meter. Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams are three notable poets who reject the idea that regular accentual meter is critical to English poetry.See, for example, Marianne Moore. Idiosyncrasy and Technique. Berkeley, California: University of California, (1958), or, for examples, William Carlos Williams. The Broken Span. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, (1941). Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm as an alternative to accentual rhythm.Robinson Jeffers. Selected Poems. New York, New York: Vintage, (1965). Meter ]] In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. Thus, "iambic pentameter" is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the "iamb." This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens. Similarly, "dactylic hexameter," comprises six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the "dactyl." Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod. More recently, iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter have been used by William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, respectively. Meter is often scanned based on the arrangement of "poetic feet" into lines. Paul Fussell. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. McGraw Hill, (1965, rev. 1979), ISBN 0-07-553606-4. In English, each foot usually includes one syllable with a stress and one or two without a stress. In other languages, it may be a combination of the number of syllables and the length of the vowel that determines how the foot is parsed, where one syllable with a long vowel may be treated as the equivalent of two syllables with short vowels. For example, in ancient Greek poetry, meter is based solely on syllable duration rather than stress. In some languages, such as English, stressed syllables are typically pronounced with greater volume, greater length, and higher pitch, and are the basis for poetic meter. In ancient Greek, these attributes were independent of each other; long vowels and syllables including a vowel plus more than one consonant actually had longer duration, approximately double that of a short vowel, while pitch and stress (dictated by the accent) were not associated with duration and played no role in the meter. Thus, a dactylic hexameter line could be envisioned as a musical phrase with six measures, each of which contained either a half note followed by two quarter notes (i.e. a long syllable followed by two short syllables), or two half notes (i.e. two long syllables); thus, the substitution of two short syllables for one long syllable resulted in a measure of the same length. Such substitution in a stress language, such as English, would not result in the same rhythmic regularity. In Anglo-Saxon meter, the unit on which lines are built is a half-line containing two stresses rather than a foot.Christine Brooke-Rose. A ZBC of Ezra Pound. Faber and Faber, (1971), ISBN 0-571-09135-0. Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not show the varying degrees of stress, as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables.Robert Pinsky. The Sounds of Poetry. New York, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, (1998), 11–24, ISBN 0374526176. As an example of how a line of meter is defined, in English-language iambic pentameter, each line has five metrical feet, and each foot is an iamb, or an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. When a particular line is scanned, there may be variations upon the basic pattern of the meter; for example, the first foot of English iambic pentameters is quite often inverted, meaning that the stress falls on the first syllable.Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry. The generally accepted names for some of the most commonly used kinds of feet include: 's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, which is written predominantly in anapestic tetrameter: "In the midst of the word he was trying to say / In the midst of his laughter and glee / He had softly and suddenly vanished away / For the snark was a boojum, you see."]] * iamb — one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable * trochee — one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable * dactyl — one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables * anapest — two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable * spondee — two stressed syllables together * pyrrhic - two unstressed syllables together (rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter) The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows: * dimeter — two feet * trimeter — three feet * tetrameter — four feet * pentameter — five feet * hexameter — six feet * heptameter — seven feet * octameter — eight feet There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb of four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Languages which utilize vowel length or intonation rather than or in addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic, often have concepts similar to the iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds. Each of these types of feet has a certain "feel," whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable verse.John Thompson, The Founding of English Meter. The dactyl, on the other hand, almost gallops along. And, as readers of The Night Before Christmas or Dr. Seuss realize, the anapest is perfect for a light-hearted, comic feel.See, for example, "Yertle the Turtle" in Dr. Seuss. Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. New York: Random House, (1958), lines from "Yurtle the Turtle" are scanned in the discussion of anapestic tetrameter. There is debate over how useful a multiplicity of different "feet" is in describing meter. For example, Robert Pinsky has argued that while dactyls are important in classical verse, English dactylic verse uses dactyls very irregularly and can be better described based on patterns of iambs and anapests, feet which he considers natural to the language.Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry at 66. Actual rhythm is significantly more complex than the basic scanned meter described above, and many scholars have sought to develop systems that would scan such complexity. Vladimir Nabokov noted that overlaid on top of the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse was a separate pattern of accents resulting from the natural pitch of the spoken words, and suggested that the term "scud" be used to distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress.Vladimir Nabokov. Notes on Prosody. New York, New York: The Bollingen Foundation, (1964), ISBN 0691017603. Metrical patterns Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearian iambic pentameter and the Homeric dactylic hexameter to the Anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a caesura (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a feminine ending to soften it or be replaced by a spondee to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular. Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, iambic tetrameter in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur or occurs to a much lesser extent in English.Nabokov. Notes on Prosody. ]] Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include: * Iambic pentameter (John Milton, Paradise Lost''Two versions of ''Paradise Lost are freely available on-line from Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg text version 1 and Project Gutenberg text version 2. ) * Dactylic hexameter (Homer, Iliad;''The original text, as translated by Samuel Butler, is available at Wikisource.http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Iliad, Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, ''Metamorphoses) * Iambic tetrameter (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"; Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)The full text is available online both in Russianhttp://www.rvb.ru/pushkin/01text/04onegin/01onegin/0836.htm?start=0&length=all and as translated into English by Charles Johnston.http://lib.ru/LITRA/PUSHKIN/ENGLISH/onegin_j.txt Please see the pages on Eugene Onegin and on Notes on Prosody and the references on those pages for discussion of the problems of translation and of the differences between Russian and English iambic tetrameter. * Trochaic octameter (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven")The full text of "The Raven" is available at Wikisourcehttp://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Raven_%28Poe%29. * Anapestic tetrameter (Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark";The full text of "The Hunting of the Snark" is available at Wikisource.http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hunting_of_the_Snark Lord Byron, Don Juan)The full text of Don Juan is available on-line.http://www.sensible.it/personal/resio/donjuan/byron/ * Alexandrine, also known as iambic hexameter (Jean Racine, Phèdre)See the Text of the play in French as well as an English translation, Rhyme, alliteration, assonance '' is written in alliterative verse and in paragraph form, not separated into lines or stanzas.]] Rhyme, alliteration, assonance and consonance are ways of creating repetitive patterns of sound. They may be used as an independent structural element in a poem, to reinforce rhythmic patterns, or as an ornamental element.Rhyme, alliteration, assonance or consonance can also carry a meaning separate from the repetitive sound patterns created. For example, Chaucer used heavy alliteration to mock Old English verse and to paint a character as archaic, and Christopher Marlowe used interlocking alliteration and consonance of "th", "f" and "s" sounds to force a lisp on a character he wanted to paint as effeminate. See, for example, the opening speech in Tamburlaine the Great available online at Project Gutenberg. Rhyme consists of identical ("hard-rhyme") or similar ("soft-rhyme") sounds placed at the ends of lines or at predictable locations within lines ("internal rhyme").For a good discussion of hard and soft rhyme see Robert Pinsky's introduction to Dante Alighieri, Robert Pinsky (Trans.). The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. New York, New York: Farar Straus & Giroux, (1994), ISBN 0374176744; the Pinsky translation includes many demonstrations of the use of soft rhyme. Languages vary in the richness of their rhyming structures; Italian, for example, has a rich rhyming structure permitting maintenance of a limited set of rhymes throughout a lengthy poem. The richness results from word endings that follow regular forms. English, with its irregular word endings adopted from other languages, is less rich in rhyme.Dante (1994). The degree of richness of a language's rhyming structures plays a substantial role in determining what poetic forms are commonly used in that language. Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur. This can be compared to an ornamental use of alliteration in most Modern European poetry, where alliterative patterns are not formal or carried through full stanzas.See the introduction to Burton Raffel. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York, New York: Signet Books, (1984), ISBN 0451628233. Alliteration is particularly useful in languages with less rich rhyming structures. Assonance, where the use of similar vowel sounds within a word rather than similar sounds at the beginning or end of a word, was widely used in skaldic poetry, but goes back to the Homeric epic. Because verbs carry much of the pitch in the English language, assonance can loosely evoke the tonal elements of Chinese poetry and so is useful in translating Chinese poetry. Consonance occurs where a consonant sound is repeated throughout a sentence without putting the sound only at the front of a word. Consonance provokes a more subtle effect than alliteration and so is less useful as a structural element. Rhyming schemes In many languages, including modern European languages and Arabic, poets use rhyme in set patterns as a structural element for specific poet forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of structural rhyme is not universal even within the European tradition. Much modern poetry avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. Rhyme entered European poetry in the High Middle Ages, in part under the influence of the Arabic language in Al Andalus (modern Spain).Maria Rosa Menocal. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, (2003), ISBN 0812213246. Irish poetry also employed rhyme relatively early, and may have influenced the development of rhyme in other European languages. Arabic language poets used rhyme extensively from the first development of literary Arabic in the sixth century, as in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some rhyming schemes have become associated with a specific language, culture or period, while other rhyming schemes have achieved use across languages, cultures or time periods. Some forms of poetry carry a consistent and well-defined rhyming scheme, such as the chant royal or the rubaiyat, while other poetic forms have variable rhyme schemes. and Beatrice see God as a point of light surrounded by angels; from Gustave Doré's illustrations to the Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto 28.]] Most rhyme schemes are described using letters that correspond to sets of rhymes, so if the first, second and fourth lines of a quatrain rhyme with each other and the third line does not rhyme, the quatrain is said to have an "a-a-b-a" rhyme scheme. This rhyme scheme is the one used, for example, in the rubaiyat form.Indeed, in translating the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald sought to retain the scheme in English. The original text is available from the Gutenberg Porject on-line for free.etext #246 Similarly, an "a-b-b-a" quatrain (what is known as "enclosed rhyme") is used in such forms as the Petrarchan sonnet. Some types of more complicated rhyming schemes have developed names of their own, separate from the "a-b-c" convention, such as the ottava rima and terza rima. The types and use of differing rhyming schemes is discussed further in the main article. ; Ottava rima :The ottava rima is a poem with a stanza of eight lines with an alternating a-b rhyming scheme for the first six lines followed by a closing couplet first used by Boccaccio. This rhyming scheme was developed for heroic epics but has also been used for mock-heroic poetry. ;Dante and terza rima Dante's Divine ComedyThe Divine Comedy at wikisource. is written in terza rima, where each stanza has three lines, with the first and third rhyming, and the second line rhyming with the first and third lines of the next stanza (thus, a-b-a / b-c-b / c-d-c, et cetera.) in a chain rhyme. The terza rima provides a flowing, progressive sense to the poem, and used skillfully it can evoke a sense of motion, both forward and backward. Terza rima is appropriately used in lengthy poems in languages with rich rhyming schemes (such as Italian, with its many common word endings).See Robert Pinsky's discussion of the difficulties of replicating terza rima in English in Robert Pinsky (trans). The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. (1994). Form Poetic form is more flexible in modernist and post-modernist poetry, and continues to be less structured than in previous literary eras. Many modern poets eschew recognisable structures or forms, and write in 'free verse'. But poetry remains distinguished from prose by its form and some regard for basic formal structures of poetry will be found in even the best free verse, however much it may appear to have been ignored. Similarly, in the best poetry written in the classical style there will be departures from strict form for emphasis or effect. Among the major structural elements often used in poetry are the line, the stanza or verse paragraph, and larger combinations of stanzas or lines such as cantos. The broader visual presentation of words and calligraphy can also be utilized. These basic units of poetic form are often combined into larger structures, called poetic forms or poetic modes (see following section), such as in the sonnet or haiku. Lines and stanzas Poetry is often separated into lines on a page. These lines may be based on the number of metrical feet, or may emphasize a rhyming pattern at the ends of lines. Lines may serve other functions, particularly where the poem is not written in a formal metrical pattern. Lines can separate, compare or contrast thoughts expressed in different units, or can highlight a change in tone. See the article on line breaks for information about the division between lines. Lines of poems are often organized into stanzas, which are denominated by the number of lines included. Thus a collection of two lines is a couplet (or distich), three lines a triplet (or tercet), four lines a quatrain, five lines a quintain (or cinquain), six lines a sestet, and eight lines an octet. These lines may or may not relate to each other by rhyme or rhythm. For example, a couplet may be two lines with identical meters which rhyme or two lines held together by a common meter alone. Stanzas often have related couplets or triplets within them. 's poem, "Noch, ulitsa, fonar, apteka" ("Night, street, lamp, drugstore"), on a wall in Leiden.]] Other poems may be organized into verse paragraphs, in which regular rhymes with established rhythms are not used, but the poetic tone is instead established by a collection of rhythms, alliterations, and rhymes established in paragraph form. Many medieval poems were written in verse paragraphs, even where regular rhymes and rhythms were used. In many forms of poetry, stanzas are interlocking, so that the rhyming scheme or other structural elements of one stanza determine those of succeeding stanzas. Examples of such interlocking stanzas include, for example, the ghazal and the villanelle, where a refrain (or, in the case of the villanelle, refrains) is established in the first stanza which then repeats in subsequent stanzas. Related to the use of interlocking stanzas is their use to separate thematic parts of a poem. For example, the strophe, antistrophe and epode of the ode form are often separated into one or more stanzas. In such cases, or where structures are meant to be highly formal, a stanza will usually form a complete thought, consisting of full sentences and cohesive thoughts. In some cases, particularly lengthier formal poetry such as some forms of epic poetry, stanzas themselves are constructed according to strict rules and then combined. In skaldic poetry, the dróttkvætt stanza had eight lines, each having three "lifts" produced with alliteration or assonance. In addition to two or three alliterations, the odd numbered lines had partial rhyme of consonants with dissimilar vowels, not necessarily at the beginning of the word; the even lines contained internal rhyme in set syllables (not necessarily at the end of the word). Each half-line had exactly six syllables, and each line ended in a trochee. The arrangement of dróttkvætts followed far less rigid rules than the construction of the individual dróttkvætts. Visual presentation ]] Even before the advent of printing, the visual appearance of poetry often added meaning or depth. Acrostic poems conveyed meanings in the initial letters of lines or in letters at other specific places in a poem. In Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese poetry, the visual presentation of finely calligraphed poems has played an important part in the overall effect of many poems. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the mass-produced visual presentations of their work. Visual elements have become an important part of the poet's toolbox, and many poets have sought to use visual presentation for a wide range of purposes. Some Modernist poetry takes this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition, whether to complement the poem's rhythm through visual caesuras of various lengths, or to create juxtapositions so as to accentuate meaning, ambiguity or irony, or simply to create an aesthetically pleasing form.For examples of different uses of visual space in modern poetry, see E. E. Cummings works or C.J. Moore's poetic translation of the Fables of LaFontaine, which usees color and page placement to complement the illustrations of Marc Chagall. Marc Chagall (illust) and C.J. Moore (trans.). Fables of La Fontaine. The New Press, (1977), ISBN 1565844041. In its most extreme form, this can lead to concrete poetry or asemic writing.A good pre-modernist example of concrete poetry is the poem about the mouse's tale in the shape of a long tail in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, available in Wikisource. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland/Chapter_3 Diction 's Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Goblin Market used complex poetic diction in nursery rhyme form: "We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits: / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry thirsty roots?"]] Poetic diction treats of the manner in which language is used, and refers not only to the sound but also to the underlying meaning and its interaction with sound and form. Many languages and poetic forms have very specific poetic dictions, to the point where distinct grammars and dialects are used specifically for poetry. Registers in poetry can range from strict employment of ordinary speech patterns, as favoured in much late 20th century prosody, through to highly ornate and aureate uses of language by such as the medieval and renaissance makars. Poetic diction can include rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor, as well as tones of voice, such as irony.See, for example, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for a well-known example of symbolism and metaphor used in poetry. The albatross that is killed by the mariner is a traditional symbol of good luck, and its death takes on metaphorical implications. Aristotle wrote in the Poetics that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor."See at 22. Since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for a poetic diction that deemphasizes rhetorical devices, attempting instead the direct presentation of things and experiences and the exploration of tone. On the other hand, Surrealists have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis. Allegorical stories are central to the poetic diction of many cultures, and were prominent in the west during classical times, the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.Aesop's Fables, repeatedly rendered in both verse and prose since first being recorded about 500 B.C., are perhaps the richest single source of allegorical poetry through the ages. Other notables examples include the Roman de la Rose, a 13th-century French poem, William Langland's Piers Ploughman in the 14th century, and Jean de la Fontaine's Fables (influenced by Aesop's) in the 17th century (available in French on wikisource).http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Fables_de_La_Fontaine. Rather than being fully allegorical, however, a poem may contain symbols or allusions that deepen the meaning or effect of its words without constructing a full allegory. Another strong element of poetic diction can be the use of vivid imagery for effect. The juxtaposition of unexpected or impossible images is, for example, a particularly strong element in surrealist poetry and haiku. Vivid images are often, as well, endowed with symbolism. Many poetic dictions use repetitive phrases for effect, either a short phrase (such as Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn" or "the wine-dark sea") or a longer refrain. Such repetition can add a somber tone to a poem, as in many odes, or can be laced with irony as the context of the words changes. For example, in Antony's famous eulogy of Caesar in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Antony's repetition of the words, "For Brutus is an honorable man," moves from a sincere tone to one that exudes irony.See Act III, Scene II in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, available at Wikisource.http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Julius_Caesar See also * Aesthetic Realism * Creative writing * Poetry therapy Notes References Linguistics and language *Zhiming Bao. The structure of tone. New York, New York: Oxford University Press (1999) ISBN 0-19-511880-4. *Morio Kono. "Perception and Psychology of Rhythm" in Accent, Intonation, Rhythm and Pause. (1997). *Moria Yip. Tone. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002) ISBN 0-521-77314-8 (hbk), ISBN 0-521-77445-4 (pbk). Category:Aesthetics Category:Linguistics Category:Literature Category:Methods of writing * Category:Spoken word